A wide variety of industrial equipment is used in virtually every industry around the world. For example, rotating equipment, such as gearboxes, are widely used in virtually any industry. As specific examples, gearboxes are often used in speed reduction and power transmission applications. A gearbox can be a single-stage gearbox or a multi-stage gearbox. A gearbox also typically includes external gearing, internal gearing, and rack and pinion gearing.
Because of this wide use, many industries are concerned with equipment failures. For example, one survey found that gearbox failures account for 34% of all failure modes (such as fatigue) in aircraft. Another survey revealed that gearbox failures account for 15% of all failures in a certain industry. Equipment failures typically result in lost revenues due to plant downtime. Accordingly, detecting potential failures (such as faults) in a gearbox or other equipment at an early stage can assist in preventing secondary damage, save maintenance costs, improve plant uptimes, reduce potential financial losses from plant downtime, and assist towards increasing productivity.
Monitoring the health of equipment is typically a time-consuming process in which a specialist custom builds a model for each asset. The specialist often specifies where to install monitoring points on the equipment, specifies how one or more sensors should be mounted, and enters the installed points in modeling software. This process allows extremely precise models to be built, which are specific to particular assets. This also allows for health monitoring hardware and wiring to be optimized.
Since this process is performed separately on each piece of equipment, however, the process is very time-consuming and costly. Even with improvements in modeling and wireless communication technologies, modeling an asset typically remains costly and can discourage the adoption of monitoring equipment on a wide scale basis.